Snow Flakes - The Ventures (mp3)

I rode a streetcar up a mountain today, starting in frosty fog and ending in sparkling snow. The urge to stomp a path into unmarked snowdrifts was more powerful than I expected. I ran around like a kid and got ice down my jeans and in my blundstones. This song is a somewhat calmer take on snow, but you can hear the sparkles, can’t you?

The Ventures produced one of the all-time great xmas albums, all obnoxious xylophone twinkles over surf guitar interpolations of famous carols. This tune pulls from Greensleeves, a traditional English song that was first registered as a broadside ballad in the friggin’ 1500s, and which became associated with Christmas around a century later (it was originally about a young, possibly-promiscuous woman).

My dad is the person who introduced me to The Ventures and to a love of Christmas music. He and I both religiously observe the rule that Christmas songs may only be played between December 1 and 25. I was thinking about my dad on the mountain today, because a ride up a snowy slope was what he told me about after I read him this short passage from Douglas Coupland’s Life After God:

Deck the Halls - Too Many Zooz (link)

Welcome back to our annual xmas countdown! Let’s start with a sweaty, busy, trumpet-heavy rendition of Deck the Halls by a band that got their start as subway buskers. It’s easy to imagine hearing this song as you descend into a station in December, feeling the cold flush fade from your cheeks as you fumble for your transit card, gradually becoming aware that your coat is going to be way too warm once you’ve crammed yourself onto the train.

I think Too Many Zooz are now too popular to play subway stations; in early 2014, a few months after I did my first set of xmas countdown emails, a video of them playing in Union Square station went viral. Good thing, too; they had started subway busking in part because their drummer’s apartment exploded in a gas leak and “going down and having to play every day” was (per this article) how he could pay for his move to a new place.

This song is joyful in a frantic way that reminds me of New York. I lived there from May to August of this year, because my boyfriend could do his summer internship from a midtown office, and we’d heard that NYC is one of the great cities, and it seemed we might not have another chance to live there. My days of deciding to up and thrust myself into a new place for a few months must surely be numbered, but I haven’t fully exited that phase of life.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - The Beths (link)

The Beths are, using a phrase my former roommate taught me this fall, jafas, which derives from the acronym Just Another Fucking Aucklander. (Around one-third of New Zealand’s population lives in the Auckland region). A colleague of mine, also from Auckland, was telling me about the “Midwinter Christmas” dinner parties he and his friends host in July, a time when the season is much more appropriate for a feast of roast ham, yorkshire pudding and candied yams. On Christmas itself, they usually have a family barbecue on the beach.

I was surprised how difficult it was for me, boreal born and bred, to put together the concepts of “Midwinter” and “July”. I googled “midwinter Christmas New Zealand”, thought “wait, no, he said it was in July”, and wrongly corrected my search to “midsummer Christmas”.

There was a bit of Twitter brouhaha in October about a Nature commentary saying that it was “necessary and inclusive” to stop using the words “summer” and “winter” when inviting researchers to events. Many people thought this was a trivial and unnecessary bit of language policing; one person I follow pushed back gently with “I’ve repeatedly seen people fail to take the frame of reference of someone in the global south. It goes beyond just using seasons. It’s a failure of perspective taking, and using unintentionally exclusive language is just a really small part of that.”

X M A S - Faye and The Scrooges (link)

This song has been described by someone I inflicted it upon as “a bit braindead”... but also so irrepressibly festive! Now, please, tell me how to spell Christmas! C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S! X-M-A-S!

Faye and The Scrooges are a somewhat informal affair. This is the only song I’m sending out this year that isn’t available on Spotify (this newsletter remains steadfastly mp3-based!). According to some decade-old sleuthing by a music blogger, the band is “a group of friends who get together and write/record a Christmas song with just enough time to give them to friends at the pub on Christmas eve”. Between 2011 and 2019, they released eight silly, excellent Christmas songs, and not another since. I don’t know why they stopped releasing songs; for all I know, they are still recording one each year, just keeping them off Soundcloud. But I rather like the idea of them doing the project for exactly as long as it was joyful, and then letting it be done.

Robin Sloan’s newsletter recently including some thoughts on finished work:

SNOWSTORM - The Raveonettes (link)

I listened to this song yesterday as my boyfriend drove me through a snowstorm from Ottawa to Toronto. It reminded of Michael Chabon’s essay “Faking It”, perhaps the one I was most affected by in Manhood For Amateurs:

Later, after we had made it safely and without incident up and down and through ice and rain and snowfall that was at times blinding, my wife told me that she initially thought I was dangerously insane when I proposed driving to Idaho Falls through a blizzard. But then she heard something in my voice that reassured her; she’d seen something in my eyes. I looked as if I knew what I was doing. And though I gripped the wheel with bloodless hands and prayed wildly to the gods of the interstate trucker whom I carefully tailed all the way to Idaho, in the backseat the kids calmly watched their videos, and my wife studied the map and gossiped with me, and none of them knew or suspected for a moment―for I never betrayed, by word or deed, my secret―that I was in way over my head. 

Earlier in the essay, he describes the broader masculine virtue of pretending to know what you’re doing:

otro año+ - Kirnbauer

This song was included on Spotify’s Navidad en México playlist, and I guess its middle verse could sort of be interpreted as being about Christmas gifting, so I’m considering it in scope for this newsletter. What comes to mind for you when you listen through the dreamy, sparse lyrics? 

Lyrics // My translation

Veo las luces cambiar en la ciudad // I see the lights change in the city
Hay robots y tengo que frenar // There are robots, I should pump the brakes
Creo que esto va a empezar // I believe this is about to start

Todos buscan algo para dar // Everyone’s looking for something to give
Que en febrero, ya no vas a usar // That, by February, is already past its use
Tragedia internacional // International tragedy

Y yo ya sé no va a volver // And I already know it won’t return
Ese lugar que un día fue // That place that was before
Sin importar voy a intentar // No matter what, I’m going to try

Es otro año más // It’s another year

It makes me think about artificial intelligence. I don’t know how much of that was that this year was a crossover in my own experience of AI.

Feliz Navidad - Los Straightjackets

Los Straightjackets are an instrumental surf guitar band who perform wearing lucha libre masks. My father recommended their Christmas Songbook to me and I really liked this take on Feliz Navidad. Thinking about felicity and luchadors got me thinking about this graph again:

I found it on the Our World In Data page on global happiness and life satisfaction, in a section on “Culture and life satisfaction”. Self-reported happiness in Latin American countries is higher than you’d expect given their GDP per capita. I forget who I saw speculating about this, but someone else on the internet wondered if this greater happiness is visible in the way that dancing is a more common pastime in LatAm than in CANZUK. 

Make It Jingle - Preservation Hall Jazz Band & Big Freedia

This song is very loosely about asking Santa for an extravagant new car for Christmas, but I think it is mostly an excuse to say vroom vroom and bounce to jingle them keys for Freedia please. It slaps as a dance song, but I’m writing here, not dancing, so I wanted to say a few things about cars.

I see more kids on the street in European cities, and I wonder if it's related to the fact that the cars are smaller and people drive more slowly. (I know the slower, smaller cars made me feel much safer on my bicycle). It pains me that children have so much less freedom to roam than previous generations.

The Season’s Upon Us - Dropkick Murphys

This song reaches its first crescendo with the lines: Some families are messed up, while others are fine, if you think yours is crazy, well, you should see mine.

I write to you from a train cruising into Toronto, on my way from the airport to my mother’s house. If I looked through her bookshelves, I might be able to track down the neon-magenta cover of a Douglas Coupland novel that she used to reference: all families are psychotic. The quote that gives the book its title, in full, is: All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it’s just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

I don’t think that’s true, but I was talking with a friend about how my boyfriend and I have some very similar assumptions about family, in a way that surely arises from the extreme cultural similarity of our upbringings (white anglo-Canadians with parents who went to graduate school and worked overseas, and with at least one grandparent in possession of a British accent). He said, well, this is also what happens when you like your family.

Kid on Christmas - Madi Diaz

Madi Diaz wrote one of the songs that hit me hardest this year, and this song hits some of the same notes: hopeful but not optimistic, melancholy about the imperfections of one’s life while trying to rally together a positive orientation:

Waking up at 5 AM before the winter sun is coming in
Is it just a stupid wish or could I ever get it back again?
I think I could feel like a kid on Christmas
Looking out the window right on time

It reminds me of a poem that my girlfriend and I have talked about several times this year, which I have copied below in full:

Sleigh Ride - Ella Fitzgerald

The melody of Sleigh Ride was written in the middle of a summer heat wave in 1946 intended as “a musical depiction of the winter season long ago” rather than a Christmas song. The lyrics make no mention of Christmas, but the song (especially the campy and delightful Ronettes version) is one of the most popular Christmas songs in the USA.

This got me wondering about the extent to which sleighs were a common or practical form of transport, and how long ago. I read this article about sleighs, and realised that I had failed to realize that, before cars were widespread, roads were not plowed, and several inches of snow was better for transportation than a dusting of ice and frost. The pre-electrification streetcars of Toronto were horse-drawn sleighs in the winter.

I am really delighted by a bunch of the historical photos I found while looking this up:

Sugar Rum Cherry (Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy) - Duke Ellington

The Nutcracker is apparently responsible for, in addition to banger rat dance tiktoks (links to Twitter instead of Tiktok because such is my distribution of vices), about 40% of the annual revenues of U.S. ballet companies. This 1960 jazz interpretation was composed by Duke Eliington and Billy Strayhorn and formed the basis of a 1996 ballet, The Harlem Nutcracker, which also transposes the plot from 1820s Germany to the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. I have not seen the Harlem Nutcracker, but I think I’ve seen The Nutcracker about as many times as I’ve seen any other ballet.

I sat in the Danish Royal Theatre, which hosts their national ballet, earlier this year:

I Want To Come Home For Christmas (SaLaAM ReMi Remix) - Mavin Gaye

Marvin Gaye co-wrote this song in 1972, the year after he released What’s Going On. Here’s what he said about that album, according to Rolling Stone:

In 1969 or 1970, I began to re-evaluate my whole concept of what I wanted my music to say.I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world.

I think the part of the lyrics that hits me the hardest is:

Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me) (Santa Baby Remix) - LISA

This song is a reworking of LISA’s single Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me), which itself reinterpolates the classic Sixpence None The Richer song. I feel unsure which lyrics are borrowed wholesale, and which have been changed. Kiss Me already has somewhat strange lyrics (beneath the milky twilight?) and my memory of them has been partially overwritten by an expertly produced horror reworking of it called Kiss Me (Kill Me). I strongly recommend the video if you’re okay with descriptions of body horror; there are no jumpscares, and the visual content is mostly animated text on a creepy-looking 1990s computer monitor, with some blood/flesh imagery.

I realized I gave you a lot of visual detail about that video (the horror sits mostly in the plot, so I wouldn’t consider the video spoiled). This is because I am very careful about consuming visual horror content, as it can easily make me permanently more afraid of the dark. At night, I do not quite hallucinate shambling horrors, but they start to feel very probable to me. Surely, if I keep looking at the dark patch on the edge of the streetlight, I will see a person that is too still to be a person standing there, and their head will begin to rotate towards me like an owl’s, revealing exposed flesh and rows of teeth. The shadows are not dripping down the walls, scattering into insectlike vibrating pieces when they hit the floor, but they would. I have some mental subprocess that is always eager to churn out horrors, and after about 1:00am in the morning, if I am sitting alone in the dark, it is difficult to suppress.

I watched horror movies as a kid and teenager, because it seemed kind of stupid to be scared of fake monsters. There is a part of me, even now, that feels like I should learn to not be afraid. When I talk to other people about this, they often agree that horror movies make them more afraid, but starting from quite a low baseline of night horrors.

Jingle Bells Dub - Mato

Welcome back to my annual xmas countdown! To start us off, I offer a wonderfully relaxed dub remix (recomposition? version? I suppose a dub is not really a remix, but an instrumental reworking) by the French DJ Mato. This song got me wondering about where dub came from. I mean, “Jamaica” is an answer I knew, but my internet wanderings have led me to learn a bit more about late 1960s recording technology and sound systems.

“Sound systems” does not refer here to machines, but to mobile disco groups (think: speakers, amplifiers, turntables, DJs) who would compete for crowds by playing exclusive music. Studios would cut exclusive dubplates, soft records made of acetate rather than vinyl, directly with lathes, rather than hydraulically pressing them in large quantities. In the 1960s, when studios began multitrack recording, they also began carving B-sides with just the instrumental track, which became popular possibly by accident:

the instrumental B-side became de rigueur, following a mixing innovation by engineer Byron Smith, which may or may not have been accidental: while mixing down an exclusive acetate for Ruddy Redwood's SRS sound system, Smith removed the vocals, and the resultant raw rhythms proved extremely popular at Ruddy's dances, particularly after U-Roy ad-libbed fluid toasts over them.

Just Like Christmas - Housewife

This song starts off sparse and dreamy, but I like how it builds up, shambly and noisy, starting halfway through at the transition from it wasn’t like Christmas at all to it was just like Christmas. 

I’m writing this after Christmas Day has technically ended in my timezone, headphones tilted so that I can hear the raucous table talk of the people still awake and playing cards in my mum’s living room. Many of the same faces that I’ve seen every December 25 for my entire life, though we don’t look the same as we did. Some old people now missing during the family phone calls, some new people shuffling the decks.

I don’t feel so young; I’m now a little older than my mum was, and a little younger than my dad was, when I was born. I look at family photos and these days I find myself more often imagining myself as the adult than the child. I feel a generational shifting from many directions; friends having children, grandparents dying, layers of incomprehensible slang from people younger than me, chewing on grief and forgiveness, mentoring rather than being mentored.

This Christmas - Pink Sweat$ and Donny Hathaway

This is a delightful and subtle rework of one of my favourite Christmas songs. The unvarnished simple joy of my world is filled with cheer… and you. The way the trumpets blare after and this Christmas will be a very special Christmas for me. Pink Sweat$ said when he was cleared to include Donny Hathaway’s original 1970 vocals on his version, he thought, “how did I ever get so lucky?” and I feel like you can hear him having grateful fun in the harmonies.

This Christmas is a love song, but I like how the lyrics emphasize simple pleasures, how much fun it’s going to be together doing fairly unremarkable Christmas tasks like trimming the tree. Not longing to meet a crush for a kiss under the mistletoe, but hang all the mistletoe / I’m gonna get to know / you better. It evokes companionate love, something described in the Triangular Theory of Love (formulated by Robert Sternberg in 1986, and apparently a “prominent theoretical concept in empirical research on love”). The theory posits three components of love: intimacy (liking and feeling connected to someone), passion (desire and physical attraction), and commitment (remaining with someone and moving towards shared goals). These three can be combined in various ways, and companionate love is when you have intimacy and commitment without passion.

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) - Lunar Vacation

Where is home for you?

It’s a complicated question for me and has been for a while. I’ve been somewhat involuntarily nomadic since my US visa application was denied in October. There is a moment of hesitation when a form or customs agent asks which country I live in. I answer “Canada”, partly because my country of citizenship isn’t allowed to get bureaucratically huffy about me living there, partly because Canada remains the default place for me to live, all other things being equal.

They are not equal, so I am preparing to repeat the (please let it not be annual) cycle of moving back to California in January after some time away. I don’t know where I will live next December! It’s probably North America, and it’s probably the SF Bay Area or Toronto or (less likely, but I’m curious about the city) Montreal, but I really don’t know?

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer - DMX

I listened to DMX’s X Gon’ Give It To Ya something like a hundred times one spring after being struck by the intensity of its beat in a Deadpool trailer. I hungered for more songs like this, and asked a friend if he could recommend anything like it, and he said, “other DMX songs, maybe”. It’s a unique style. After he died of an overdose in 2021, Hanif Abdurraqib, one of my favourite music writers, tweeted: “DMX was also, plainly, a very good rapper. One who was impossible to push around on a beat. So many of those Swizz tracks were almost designed to overpower rappers, and X would take them apart. Tear them down to the foundation.” 

I guess I write the above to convince you that I’m sharing this song with sincerely, though part of its appeal is the strange contrast of such a rough voice saying Rudolph, the same way Bob Dylan’s The First Noël appeals to me in part because his gravelly voice challenges my idea of what the song is meant to sound like.

At the same time, I notice I have cultivated a music taste where I like just enough rap to feel I have not been unfairly dismissive (and possibly racist) towards the genre, while not really being conversant with it. My friend Sean made the same observation about his own music taste in response to a tangential remark in an old Joseph Heath post, Absent-mindedness as dominance behaviour:

Holiday - Monogem

I enjoy and envy this song’s casually bilingual lyrics. The chorus:

Doesn’t matter what you celebrate y no importa que holiday
Ahora disfrutemos, ahora on a holiday

My mum tells me about how my Armenian grandmother, who spoke five languages before coming to Canada (none of them English), would chat with her multilingual friends, flitting between English, Italian, Armenian, French, and more, depending on which best suited the sentiment they were trying to express. I wish my friends and I were similarly fluid-fluent.